Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle Review

Andy Serkis wanted the Kipling that is about belonging to nothing, and the bones of that film are here: the pack's rejection is genuinely cruel, the village sequences have an unease the Disney version would never permit, and the hunting trophy reveal late on is the single best idea in either adaptation. The performance capture is the trouble. The animals carry recognisable human faces stretched across animal skulls, so Bale's Bagheera and Benedict Cumberbatch's Shere Khan sit in an uncanny middle register that reads as neither beast nor person, and the effect worsens every time an animal has to emote.

Bale is doing careful vocal work that the rendering keeps undercutting. Rohan Chand is a real find as Mowgli, physical and unshowy. Structurally the film rushes, compressing years into a montage and then lingering on scenes that add nothing, and the dialogue too often states the theme aloud. Arriving after Jon Favreau's far more polished version, it looks like the rougher draft of an idea that deserved a cleaner one.